CREATOR EXCLUSIVE
Prepare for admittance to The Second Best Hospital In The Galaxy with series creator Cirocco Dunlap
WHAT’S BEEN MISSING FROM THE genre landscape? How about a horny, female-centric, adult animated series featuring hardcore SF storylines and Grey’s Anatomy-esque personal dramas, with a surreal aesthetic that’s somewhere between Scavengers Reign and The Fifth Element? If that sounds like your kind of weird, get ready to check into Prime Video’s The Second Best Hospital In The Galaxy.
Created by writer Cirocco Dunlap (Russian Doll), The Second Best Hospital In The Galaxy is essentially a mash-up of the real-life topics and influential shows rattling around inside her noggin. “I love sci-fi and anything with weird genre stuff,” Dunlap tells Red Alert. “And I love comedy and animation. I thought this seems like a really fun place to put a whole lot of ideas that are pretty disparate into a world where they can all live.”
Originally pitching it in 2019, Dunlap developed an animated comedy, set in 14002, at an intergalactic hospital where renowned surgeons Dr Sleech (Stephanie Hsu) and Dr Klak (Keke Palmer) save the lives of myriad aliens in very unconventional ways. The show intentionally throws audiences into a high concept world where there are no humans, and the species featured have bizarre biology and inherent abilities. It’s deep end sci-fi, yet the personal problems facing the doctor/besties are entirely relatable.
“As a fan of sci-fi, I prefer the things that don’t hold your hand as much,” Dunlap says of her choice to make audiences work to acclimate to the world of Sleech and Klak.
“But it’s always that fine line, because I want this show to be accessible. I feel like a lot of sci-fi is alienating. It’s male. Some people really like that very hard sci-fi. But personally, I am drawn to the things that are more characterbased and so I wanted this to be welcoming.”
Through the deep friendship between Sleech and Klak, the mundane and profane get showcased as they goad one another to overcome their personal issues while navigating around the hospital’s eclectic staff of other alien healers, including empath Dr Plowp (Kieran Culkin), ancient being Dr Vlam (Maya Rudolph) and salty Nurse Tup (Natasha Lyonne).
“It was such a hard show to write because you’ve got the hospital idea, you’ve got the sci-fi on top of it, but then you want something that feels emotionally relevant,” Dunlap says. “Every single episode was a learning curve.”
Dunlap says that the freedom of the genre and the lack of human rules for her characters opened th
